fall onto the streets in my arms
by coleytaylor
Summary: "It's okay, Emily. You could have told me." Emily takes a half-step back towards him. "Told you what?" "You're who Spencer was seeing."


Emily closes the door to Toby's hospital room behind her. There's a chair next to his bed, but she stays standing. There's no reason to draw this out any longer than it needs to be.

"I've been wanting to talk," Toby says.

"Me, too."

"Emily, what's wrong?"

Emily wants so badly to tell him. She sometimes forgets that they were friends, too, before all of this got so complicated. She says, "It's Spencer." It's not a lie.

"What? Is she okay?"

Emily shakes her head. "Before you and she got together, she was seeing someone else. It wasn't right and she knew it." She takes a breath. It's not lying. "But he's back now, and…"

"What?"

"It's not right again."

"I don't— That's not possible." Toby's arm was broken in the fall yesterday, and Emily watches his heart break in the hospital bed. But he recovers fast: he must really love Spencer. It makes finishing this lie that much harder.

"Why are you telling me this?" Toby asks when Emily doesn't fill the silence.

"Spencer couldn't. She's been wanting to for a long time."

"Long time?"

"I'm so sorry, Toby," Emily says. She turns to leave. If she doesn't come down with another stress ulcer by the end of this year, it'll be a medical miracle.

Toby catches her before she can open the door. "Tell me one thing," he says. "Who is it?"

Emily stops cold. She can feel her blood pounding in her ears, every pulse of her traitorous heart a reminder of what she's doing to Toby. It's for his own good, she knows, but that doesn't make it any easier. And Spencer didn't give her anything to say here. It was supposed to be a clean break: a what, not a who or a how or a why. It seems so unlike the Spencer Emily knows to not plan for every little detail. They're all a little off their game these days.

The moment has officially stretched on for longer than is explainable. Emily is standing here, about to be caught in a lie, when Toby suddenly and visibly relaxes on the bed. A few seconds ago, he looked like he was about to shred through his clothing and transform into a werewolf, but now he looks almost… apologetic.

"It's okay, Emily. You could have told me."

Emily takes a half-step back towards him. "Told you what?"

"You're who Spencer was seeing."

"Oh, no, I, uh—"

"It's okay," Toby says again, and he looks like he means it. "Spencer should have told me she needed a little time to figure things out, but I'm not mad."

Emily forces a quick smile. She hopes it looks more convincing than it feels. "We, um, really wanted to tell you."

"Thank you for being honest with me." If he weren't severely injured, Emily can tell that Toby would stand up and give her a hug.

She reaches over and awkwardly pats him on the hand. "Yeah," Emily says, and then leaves the hospital room feeling even worse than she expected to.

* * *

Emily has had a lot of practice being friends with straight girls. She keeps her eyes down in locker rooms or slumber party changes, all that obvious stuff—she's a lesbian, not a perv—but there are a lot more unwritten rules to follow. Emily's learned to be careful with casual touch, not to talk too much about women in magazines or on TV. Her friends are far from homophobic, but she's had to put in the work to learn, anyway.

The point is, she knows how to be friends with her friends. What she doesn't know is how to be… How did Toby put it? Someone Spencer is "figuring things out" with?

Emily tries to tell her. Half a dozen times over the next couple days Emily gathers her courage to do it, and then there's a mysterious text message or a new decrypted video clip or a Jenna-and-Noel sighting, and she decides that it can wait. She tries.

Spencer and Emily meet for coffee the next week after school. A can turn their lives upside down, inside out, and sideways, but Spencer's dependency on caffeine is a reliable constant.

They stand for a moment outside the coffee shop, and Emily almost feels like a normal teenager. Emily half listens to Spencer tell her about the latest AP Russian history assignment and licks the whipped cream off the top of her café mocha.

She sees a familiar face across the street, and remembers that things haven't been normal for a long time. Emily puts the lid back on her coffee.

"Spencer, I need to tell you something," Emily says, panic rising in her throat. Toby definitely saw them, and he's waiting at the crosswalk for the light to change.

"Were you listening to me, Em? Fifteen pages!"

"I lied to Toby," Emily blurts.

"What?"

The light turns yellow. Emily's always been a procrastinator.

"In the hospital that day, I lied to Toby."

Spencer frowns. "I know, that's what I told you to do. It worked, didn't it? He stopped calling me."

"Yeah, but—"

Toby's walking towards them now, approaching Spencer's back. He's smiling so nicely, so earnestly at her. It's too late to turn back now. Emily reaches out and grabs Spencer's hand.

Spencer doesn't jerk back right away, just looks puzzled down at their hands. Spencer and Hanna and Aria have always been so far in the friend category that Emily's never even thought of them romantically, but in this instant, well. She can't help but think about it a little.

Toby stops under the awning of the café to give Emily a pat on the shoulder with his good arm. "Hey, Emily!" He gives Spencer more of a polite nod. "Spencer."

Spencer's grip tightens when Toby says her name. "Hi, Toby," she says.

Emily knows this can't be easy for her. She pretends to check her watch, and then turns to Toby apologetically. "We should really get to school."

"I won't keep you," Toby says, with the air of someone who knows what happens to people who make a Hastings late. But he does fix Spencer with a look that can only be described as intense before they go. "I'm glad you're happy, Spencer. Even if it's not with me. And I'm sorry if I ever did anything to make you not feel comfortable enough to tell me what you were going through."

"Um, thanks," Spencer says. "It's… okay?"

Toby, ever the gentleman, lets them go. Emily sighs a sigh of relief of epic proportions and pulls Spencer into her car before she can accidentally contradict any of their enormous web of lies.

"What was that all about?"

"I'm sorry, Spence. I tried to tell you." Emily bites her lip. "At the hospital, Toby asked who it was that you were seeing, and I just…"

Emily looks up at Spencer, waiting for the brunt of her anger to fall on her. Or at least her the brunt of her annoyance. Spencer looks like she's piecing things together, and then she bursts out laughing.

Emily's actually a little offended. Not that she's ever thought about Spencer _like that_, but come on. Would them being together really be that crazy?

"What's so funny?"

Spencer wipes a tear from her eye. "No, oh my God, Em. I'm just relieved. Of all the bombshells that have been dropped on us in the past few months…" Spencer laughs again at herself. "This I can handle."

* * *

The way Spencer Hastings "handles" things is, as Emily should have guessed, planning obsessively for them. That afternoon, Emily finds herself lying on Spencer's bed, watching Spencer pace back and forth across her bedroom. It's somewhere between plan-pacing and stress-pacing, so Emily figures they're alright.

It seems pretty simple to her. When Toby shows up, they stand a little closer together, hold hands, maybe throw around some pet names. But Spencer has to figure out every detail. When did they start dating, how serious are they, what color would the napkins be at the hypothetical kids table at their hypothetical wedding?

"It's okay, Spence," Emily says, rolling onto her side. "Toby's not going to think we're lying. We can just be one of those couples that doesn't do PDA."

Spencer sits down on the bed beside her. "I know," she says, reaching for Emily's hand.

Emily flinches. It's a hard thing to unlearn, all those years of carefully avoiding touch. "Sorry, it's just weird to do this with my hot, straight best friend." Emily tries to roll her eyes, but she blushes as she say it.

"Thank you, Emily," Spencer says, achingly earnest, and reaches for Emily's hand again. This time, Emily lets Spencer place a hand over hers, and it feels alright. "For helping me keep Toby safe. I know he was your friend too."

It's stupid, Emily thinks. To be disappointed. This was always a charade for Toby's benefit; to even imagine anything more would be ridiculous. Emily shouldn't be disappointed. She and Spencer are friends, and they always will be.

Spencer bounces up from the bed and over to her desk, already moving on to the next task. She uncaps a highlighter and swivels back around to smirk at Emily. "And who said anything about straight?"

* * *

Caleb is supposed to meet them in the courtyard during his free period to show them a new file he successfully decrypted, so the four of them eat lunch outside at a picnic table.

Aria is telling them about her latest family drama. "My mom is totally going to flip."

Emily nods absently, and then sees him: Toby is here, at Rosewood High. He's wearing his work clothes and talking to the head custodian, maybe for a contracting job. He's here.

"Spencer, do you have an extra tampon?" Emily asks pointedly.

Spencer looks confused for a second, and then follows Emily's gaze to where Toby appears to be engrossed in talking specs with Mr. Lombardo. "I think I have one in my locker," Spencer says, and then she's following Emily inside to the hallway.

"We don't have to keep it up at school," Emily says right away. The way Alison led her on in front of all of them still makes Emily cringe; she doesn't need a repeat with Spencer. "People will talk."

"Oh, let them."

"Are you sure, Spencer? Everyone already thinks we were involved in Alison's murder. Do you really want to deal with people's homophobia on top of all of that? Especially," Emily swallows, "if you're not really gay?"

Spencer smiles again, and Emily is so frustrated. Why can she not take this seriously?

"Why are you still stuck on that?"

"What?" Emily doesn't hope.

"That I'm straight."

Emily's heard of bisexuality, thank you very much. It's just, Spencer always seemed so interested in boys. Emily's gaydar hasn't had a ton of mileage yet, but she thinks she would have noticed something before now.

"Aren't you?"

"Let's just say," Spencer says, taking a step into Emily's personal space, "I learned more than how to flat stick tackle at field hockey camp."

Spencer smells so good, like vanilla and cinnamon and organization. Her hair is coming out of its bun in wisps to frame her face, and Emily wants to do something stupid.

"This isn't just because of Toby," she says, taking her own step forward, closing the gap between them, "right?"

Spencer shakes her head. "I've wanted to do this for a long time."

Emily lets it all melt away—the hallway, Hanna and Aria waiting for them outside, Alison's disappearance, whatever fresh Hell A has in store for them next—and kisses Spencer. It's going to come at a price, for sure; everything does, but if she's going to pay for whatever she gets up to with her friends, Emily might as well have a little fun.


End file.
